At Quarry Farm

James Plath's At Quarry Farm is a finely-tuned collection that reverberates with the purest chords of Mark Twain as man, writer, husband, and father. These exquisitely-rendered and often precise poems are a celebration of Twain in his most distilled and life-affirming element: working on his finest novels, during joy-filled summers, among the family he deeply loved, and lost, one by one, except a single surviving daughter. Plath poignantly notes the courage it took for Twain to go on after such loss, and to twist from his sorrow pure creation. Through his own depth of empathy for Twain, James Plath has done the same.

-Lorian Hemingway, author, Walking into the River and Walk on Water: A Memoir

Sam Clemens would be pleased by this book, to have drawn the poet from the scatteration of the 21st to the delicacy of the 19th, the writer at work on Huck Finn in a cloud of smoke, the hikes with his girls, the barn cats and billiards and Regulator clock and Livy on the porch. Life is play, meant to be lived, was then and is now.

-Garrison Keillor, author, Lake Wobegon Days and editor, Good Poems

When the Langdon family gave Quarry Farm to Elmira College, they insisted the house not turn into a museum, but a retreat for scholars, writers, and artists working in the field of Mark Twain Studies. Quarry Farm is a special place, and James Plath has captured the essence of what it's like to live and work there. Not many people have the opportunity to experience Quarry Farm as it's meant to be experienced, but Plath gets them pretty darn close.

-Dr. Joseph Lemak, director, Center for Mark Twain Studies